Heike Sütter: The Seeing Justitia

Although made of “just” light, grids impressively overwrite the exterior of the Palace of Justice. Victoria Coeln designed these light graphics specifically for this location. At first, I thought a completely new space was being created here. On a visual level, that may be true. But when the content comes to the forefront, light, art, and real space merge into a coherent, logically consistent whole.

What are grids? First of all, a tool that divides a whole into regular — and thus comprehensible, manageable, and predictable — parts. It helps us to grasp the complex, to indicate a traceable position and perhaps also to situate ourselves in relation to it. It is — a kind of coordinate system, namely an objective, supra-individual, calculable one… This is where the spark jumped to the site for me: What could better express the complex, abstract system of law, which must subsume so many individual facts under general rules, than a grid that lays itself over the building as a system of coordinates and navigation? It points to the objective framework of law and its norms, which, without regard to a person’s identity, gender, social status, or origin, locate actions, facts, and values. This offers us a reliable framework within which we can move, and at the same time a reliable anchor from which interpretation and creativity become possible. Without such a foundation, democracy is unthinkable. We know where we stand. Seen in this light, it is also consistent that the Austrian Justitia opens her eyes and holds a book instead of the scales. One step further, the organic lines of light that Victoria Coeln preferably uses in wide landscapes, squares, and architecture are like a complement, a contrasting supplement to the geometric grid. They represent individual traces of seeing and light, which continuously reconnect things through vision, recontextualize them anew and perhaps also dissolve them again. One is rhizome, the other grid. Both are necessary for our understanding of the world.